


so long we become the flowers

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: when it feels like the world's gone mad (dark stories) [22]
Category: Shrek (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Death, Dark, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Everybody Dies, Fractured Fairy Tale, Healing, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Rape Recovery, Revolution, Well almost everybody, but it sucks a bit less, but then characters decided they wanted a better ending, so everything still sucks, this was supposed to be a tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 21:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17333006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: Rumplestiltskin tricks the fairy godmother into signing away her powers on Fiona’s fifteenth birthday, four years before Shrek would ever find reason to leave his swamp.The kingdom falls within minutes.-(Always read the fine print. Be careful what you sign, be careful what your actions can bring about.)-You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you? The villain curses the hero, and after a quest to find a solution everything is fixed with true love’s kiss.What happens when the villain takes hold of the kingdom before the hero has had a chance to enter the story?-There is a boy in the tower that used to be a Princess’, now stripped of its finery and guarded by three sadistic witches. The dragon is dead, slayed by Fiona. Fiona has been slain by Charming. All that is left is that little blonde-haired boy and the nightmares that haunt his tired eyes.Those who live nearby know what happens in that tower, what King Rumplestiltskin's favored General does to the boy trapped there, but they don’t talk about it. They duck their heads, seal their lips, and pray for the Usurper's death.





	so long we become the flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigriswolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigriswolf/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hierarchy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/273843) by [tigriswolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigriswolf/pseuds/tigriswolf). 



> Title is from "In A Week" by Hozier.
> 
> So, to tell the truth, I saw the quote included at the beginning of the story below and my first thought was of Rumpelstiltskin's kingdom in Shrek 4, and what might have happened if True Love's Kiss hadn't worked. Then I went a bit further than that, wondering what might have happened if Rumpelstiltskin had used his powers earlier. And this is what happened.
> 
> Also, totally read tigriswolf's "Hierarchy," which I also drew a lot of inspiration from for this fic.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, this is the first fic in my "tiny ass fandom fest," which will be made of as many fics as I can write from fandoms with less than 900 fics. I'm going to try to write at least one fic a day, each from a different fandom, but I have a feeling that some days will have more than one while some will have less.
> 
> Fics so far in the fandom at the time of writing: 376

_"In the caves behind my house, I found the ruins of a softer world._

_Kindness couldn't save them."_

**-e horne and j comeau**

 

True love’s kiss doesn’t work. Perhaps the feelings aren’t there, or maybe the kiss is just a little too late. Either way, Shrek dies, bleeding out on the floor of Rumplestilskin’s castle, and Fiona and her army is left to take back the castle from an imp who is too weak to stop them.

A week later, the door to a tower opens, and inside a scrawny man can be found, chained to the floor of a barren room.

An ogre enters the room, her fiery red hair pulled back in a braid. She wears no crown, no dress, is instead dressed in armor and a simple tunic and trousers. There is a sword strapped to her back and ghosts in her eyes.

“Be merciful,” Arthur says, voice resigned. He has learned all too well that the word ‘monster’ has nothing to do with appearances, that the worst of monsters are contained within the faces of handsome princes. “Kill me quickly.”

“I’m a better woman than that," a somehow familiar voice says, and Arthur blinks at her while she leans down. Her large green fingers start to undo his chains, gentle in a way Charming and Rumplestilskin never were. "Nice to see you again, cousin."

- 

How did the heir to the throne end up in a tower cell that used to hold a cursed maiden? How did he end up here, guarded by witches and tortured? Well, that's a story for another time.

Or, perhaps, we could tell another ending, another story as to how Arthur ended up on that tower floor. Explain what really happened, the truest ending of all.

Peel back the story a little further. Push a little harder. A page away, a story left untold, an ending unmade.

-

Rumplestiltskin tricks the fairy godmother into signing away her powers on Fiona’s fifteenth birthday, four years before Shrek would ever find reason to leave his swamp.

The kingdom falls within minutes.

-

(Always read the fine print. Be careful what you sign, be careful what your actions can bring about.)

-

You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you? The villain curses the hero, and after a quest to find a solution everything is fixed with true love’s kiss.

What happens when the villain takes hold of the kingdom before the hero has had a chance to enter the story?

-

Lord Farquaad has his men hunt down Snow White and wait. Her True Love- a peasant girl with bright eyes and torn skirts- awakens her with a kiss, and within moments his men have struck. They bring a half-awoken Snow White to his castle, where he weds her within a day and then escapes away to her kingdom, seeking a way out of the wasteland that Far Far Away has become.

(Arthur finds the peasant girl’s corpse buried beneath a maple tree, years later.)

The fairy tale creatures are never relegated to the swampland ghetto, and thus Shrek never leaves his swamp.

Fiona escapes her tower on her own, but she remains cursed in her ogre form. She builds herself an army to combat the man who stole her parents' throne.

Rumplestiltskin promises Charming land and a title for only the price of his sword, and he becomes Rumplestiltskin's number one general. Charming and his army of enchanted horsemen (once farmers and knights, before they laid enchanted pen to paper) slay ogres, eventually taking down the General Fiona herself.

Charming asks then for his prize, but Rumplestiltskin has already had him kill the ogre fated to be his wife.

However, there is another heir to the throne of Far Far Away, one who does not yet know his own identity in this life.

-

There is a boy in the tower that used to be a Princess’, now stripped of its finery and guarded by three sadistic witches. The dragon is dead, slayed by Fiona. Fiona has been slain by Charming. All that is left is that little blonde-haired boy and the nightmares that haunt his tired eyes.

Those who live nearby know what happens in that tower, what King Rumplestiltskin's favored General does to the boy trapped there, but they don’t talk about it. They duck their heads, seal their lips, and pray for the Usurper's death.

-

It takes a small loophole in a minor contract- boyhood for the price of Pinocchio's unborn son- to undo Rumpelstilskin's hold on the Fairy Godmother's power. When the blowback from the failed contract is over, Rumpelstiltskin is left powerless and shaking.

An army of ogres and fairytale creatures and emaciated humans take back the wasteland kingdom.

Charming deals a fatal blow to Pinnochio, but the Wolf takes out Charming from behind. The ogres and Kate, a butcher's daughter from a famine-stricken village, take out Charming's enchanted army.

Then they turn their eyes toward the castle, to the place where a weak Rumpelstiltskin cowers behind an army of witches. They raise their swords, their knives, their hand-made spears.

It's time to take back the throne.

-

The castle falls within a week, the same that it fell when Rumpelstiltskin wielded the powers of the Fairy Godmother herself.

-

The door to a tower room opens, and it’s not a Prince. It’s not an ogre and his noble steed. It's not even a Princess, back to save the boy trapped in her former prison. It’s just a weary peasant farmer, the only one brave enough to see the ghost that haunts the tower.

(Remember this bit? The beginning of the story? Some things stay the same, some change, but there will always be someone to save the broken, someone to clean up the messes that greater men have wrought.)

“What’s going on?” The boy chained to the floor asks, and the farmer just helps him out of the chains.

“The Usurper is dead, kid,” the farmer says, ignoring the bruises and the tattered clothing. "You're free to go live wherever and however you want."

-

When Arthur reaches the door, he sees the sunlight for the first time in eight years. It sears his skin, a bit, but he relishes the pain.

He goes around the kingdom, searching for answers. He sees death itself, sees mass graves and ruined villages and wrecked families. Fairytales and True Love's kiss don't mean anything to these people. Sometimes True Love is killed, sometimes it doesn't get a chance to form. Sometimes the most noble, the kindest, die too young.

He tries his best to help people. He doesn't like talking to them, but he puts his scrawny arms to use in rebuilding their homes.

Someday, he knows he'll have to return to the castle and take the throne. But for now, there is so much to do and he thinks that turning his body from a receptacle for someone else's abuse into something he can use for growth is a good way to start the reign he'll inevitably have to have.

-

He finds Charming's corpse at one point, and the revulsion turns his stomach.

The Wolf kicks Charming's corpse. "He's nothing but a monster," The Wolf says, and from the look in the Wolf's eyes Arthur thinks the Wolf might understand the half of it.

The instructors at school told him never to speak ill of the dead, but when this man has put so many bodies in their graves, destroyed so many lives, Arthur's pretty sure he can make an exception.

Arthur spits on Charming's corpse and leaves the ditch where the body lays. He's not going to bury it. Let it rot, let the animals peck at his bones. Let the land itself cover it up in its own time, consuming Charming's body as it heals over the scars left by Rumpelstiltskin's reign of terror.

-

Arthur finds his way back. Of course he does. He faces that tower that he was kept in, that his cousin was kept in, that dragons and princesses died in, and he sits down on the grass on this side of the lava moat, his back to the heat. He wraps a threadbare blanket from a local farmer around his shoulders and watches the sun as it goes down, something he could never see from the position he was chained in when in the tower.

An ogre comes up to him. She is dressed in armor and simple clothing, her hair pulled back into a braid.

"Are you Arthur?" she asks, and she sounds so young. As young as he was, when he was first trapped in that tower.

He nods. "And you are?"

"Elga," she says, "Daughter of Iga and Rik. Mind if I sit by you?"

The sun is setting, turning his skin golden. He is no longer pale- his skin is burnt and tanned by working long hours in the sun. His hair is long and pulled back, its former golden color bleached almost white by the sun's rays. He is a man now, not the child who knew what innocence meant.

He nods and gestures to the spot on the grass next to him. Elga sits, and he offers her his blanket. She shakes her head. "You're a human- your body doesn't hold its heat as well as ours do."

He nods and tucks the blanket in around him a little further.

"So," she asks, "I hear you're the heir to the throne?"

Once upon a time, he was. At least, that's what Charming scorned him for, sometimes, in between his uses of Arthur's body.

Maybe Arthur will be again.

"Once upon a time," he says, "I was. Someday I'll do it again."

"Good," Elga says, "You seem like a good man."

A good man? Arthur doesn't know about that. 'Broken' seems more accurate. But he guesses that if the people-  _his_ people, now that the King and Queen and Princess are all dead- think he's be good, then he can at least try at such a thing.

But for now, he will sit with Elga, watching the last of the sun disappear below the horizon, watching the world turn.

"But in the meantime," Elga says ten minutes later, once the sun has set and the first of the stars have made their appearance in the sky. "I came over here to ask if you wanted to join some of the other ogres and I for a midnight feast. We'd love to have the guy who helped rebuild Rothar's meatpie shop yesterday join us."

Her eyes are bright and hopeful, despite the weapon strapped to her belt, and Arthur gathers up his blanket and slips on his sandals. Elga smiles at him, baring sharp teeth that could probably chop his head in half if one believed the tales.

"Show the way," he says, giving her a smile that practically creaks from how long ago he last used it.

And then they live.

Forever after.

 

 _I am myself again. There are no loose ends._  
_I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments._  
_I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,_  
_Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again._

**_-Sylvia Plath, Three Women_ **

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it, please feel free to leave kudos and comments! Comments are a writer's lifeblood and are very much appreciated!


End file.
